Word: phantasmagoria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...When it comes to guns, anything is possible in what Polemicist Robert Sherrill (The Accidental President, The Drugstore Liberal) calls "a phantasmagoria of roscoes." Although the U.S. has no corner on the world's violence, no nation offers its citizens such grand opportunities to display their dissatisfactions with such destructive results. A few random examples, courtesy of Sherrill's research: Dateline New York. Two youths ask a shopkeeper for apple pie. He offers them Danish pastry instead and is shot dead. Ohio. An engineer living near an Air Force base tattoos a number of bomb-laden...
...obviously correct. The atmosphere in Washington is a weatherman's nightmare: it changes all the time. Right now we witness another phantasmagoria of events in Washington, and we are tempted to insist on knowing who did what to whom when and why. More facts come in, and they confuse us. We will never know, we complain, expecting to judge men's guilt with the omnipotence of the Old Testament God. We probably will never know the answers to those questions. But we should ask other questions. It is time to realize that the truths of history go beyond the guilt...
SIDDHARTHA is set in the India of 25 centuries ago, but it has the contemporary familiarity of a quickie weekend at Esalen. Hermann Hesse's novel has been adapted with stuporous devotion by Conrad Rooks, who in 1967 unleashed Chappaqua, a shambling phantasmagoria of the hallucinatory world of alcoholism and drug addiction. His skills have become no sharper in the intervening years. Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor), as any campus sophomore would know, spends the better part of his lifetime beating the bushes in search of spiritual insight and fulfillment. It is a hard job achieving nirvana, and seems to require...
...Phantasmagoria is rarely well done in film. Certainly in America the only work which approaches it successfully is 2001--which concerns technology, not humanity. The reason The Saragossa Manuscript works is that Haas sees social reality, when bounded by hypocrisy, to be truly phantasmagorical, and perceives the special logic of dreams. The only man in the film with the same argumentative power as the cabalist is the rationalist--but he is historically inappropriate, and ineffective at protecting himself against Inquisitors...
Petulla is one of the most interesting American films of the 60's, and at times is not only ambitious, but successful. It marked an abrupt about-race for Director Richard Lester, who had previously been known for the Beatle films, and for his ground-breaking anti-war phantasmagoria How I Won the War. The story of an affair between two upper-middle-class eccentrics, Petulia makes audiences uncomfortable because both parties are messed up, and can't come together in a way which would help them grow. It also aroused the more chauvinistic American critics because of its depiction...